What is a neutral influencer marketing agency?

Esme Rice - Marketing Manager

22nd August 2018

We often talk about being a neutral influencer and the advantages that this has, but sometimes it isn’t clear why being neutral would be beneficial. Here’s it broken down into the differences between agencies, and why we believe neutral is best.

How is Goat neutral?

Well, we do not align ourself or have commitments to any influencer, channel or platform. We don’t own or manage any talent, pages or have any agreements with any social or streaming platform.

This means, that when we select influencers or pages to promote content or create content via we are making the decision purely on previous performance data and predicted results.

The alternative

Talent Agencies – they are paid to represent their influencers rather than the client or brand and so when they are putting forward their influencers for campaigns, they may not necessarily be the most relevant or highest performing influencer for that brand. The agency is biased towards their influencers and talent.

Media alliances – some agencies may receive money back for amounts they spend on platforms. For example, if they spend £100k on a particular social channel then the social channel will pay them £15k. Their profits and margins are being paid by the platform, not the client and therefore the campaign is biased.

Do we still have bias?

But we must have favourites right? Of course! Our favourite influencers and pages are those who perform the best consistently. We’re always working to increase and promote this. This can be achieved by building long-term relationships between an influencer and a brand. Alternatively, as we constantly track campaign results we may realise that Instagram posts are performing much better in the first phase of a campaign and so we’d increase Instagram activity during the second phase. Being reactive to results and building relationships are just two of the ways we aim to increase the results of our campaigns for clients.

Our philosophy of influencer marketing was born from client side struggles as our three co-founders found no agency could deliver the results they were already driving with in-house campaigns. They set up Goat to deliver the same value to other brands and go against biased agency models. Thus, Goat the neutral influencer marketing agency was born.